O'NEILL: A brief history of stupid

That was Vice President Dan Quayle, uttering one of those numb-nut comments that Republicans have become famous for making. In fact, Quayle’s fearless defense of his misstatements back in the ’90s seems to have anticipated Mitt Romney’s more recent affirmation of his own infallible wisdom.

"I don’t know what I said," he told a reporter, "but I stand by it, whatever it was."

Isn’t the correlation between arrogance and stupidity a wonder to behold? More and more frequently now, the United States of America is starting to look like Victorian England, where an inbred and massively entitled ruling class of ninnies and twits held sway.

I just finished reading two books on the Crimean War, that mid-19th century flight of folly that cost a lot of money, got lots of people killed, and provided something to do for some of Great Britain’s most stunningly stupid and incompetent high-born doofuses.

A lot of it sounded uncannily similar to some of the nonsense we’ve been living through. When the British enshrined aristocratic duncery, it cost them an empire. It doesn’t seem to be doing us much good, either.

Clear thinking doesn’t seem like it’s the Republican Party’s strong suit lately. Not that Republicans hold a monopoly on dopey stuff, but they sure have amassed a pretty big compendium of addled thoughts, a volume of squirrelly utterances that’s been growing even faster since the Tea Party acquired such a big megaphone with Republicans.

But, because he’s slipping out of memory, and because he set the standard for so much of what was to come, let’s return to one of our own privileged aristocrats for a moment and dip back in time to revisit some of the aforementioned Dan Quayle’s insights, the clockwork precision of his mind at work.

"We don’t want to go back to tomorrow," Quayle once observed. "We want to go forward."

Or, if that doesn’t seem like the nattering of a nincompoop nabob, you might try the one in which Quayle opined: "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change."

Except for his uncertainty about the meaning of the word "irreversible," that observation makes a lot of sense, as does his inspiring insight that "if we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure." How true that is.

And could it have been one of those Freudian slips in which people inadvertently reveal the truth when Dan Quayle said: "No matter how rough the road may be, we can and will, never, never surrender to what is right." That does sound like the Republican mantra, I think, though seldom so clearly expressed.

Quayle also once lamented his lack of skills in languages other than English when he said, "I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."

And he revealed that he maybe should have studied English a bit harder when he said, "Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and a child."

But going back in time to pick nits over nitwit things said by a nitwit who was once a heartbeat away from holding the highest office in the land would hardly be worth doing if we weren’t still electing so many such stupid people to high offices. For instance, our own Arnold Schwarzenegger had this brilliant insight into one of the big issues of the day: "I think that gay marriage should be between a man and a woman," sayeth the former Governator.

And here’s Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander on the subject of guns earlier this year: "I think video games is a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people."

Huh?

Here’s Mitt Romney, extolling love of country in terms that reflect a fairly disordered thought process: "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love." Lots’a substance there.

Then there was all that Biology 101 wisdom shared by Republicans last year, like Richard Mourdock’s notion that made God an accessory to rape.

"I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape," Mourdock opined, "that it is something that God intended to happen."

And we all remember the brilliant medical knowledge expressed by Missouri Republican Tod Akin, who said, "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down"

Mourdouck and Akin were the "Dumb and Dumber" of the seminar on rape conducted by Republicans last year.

In the second presidential debate of 2012, Mitt Romney vowed that he would, "as president ... create 12 million new jobs." Forty-five minutes later, he said: "Government does not create jobs." Then, for emphasis, he added, "Government does not create jobs." How Romney figured on creating jobs while he was working for the government is, then, rather a big chasm in the path of his logic.

The Republicans really ought to get up a collection for a Dan Quayle statue. He wasn’t the first Republican to say dumb stuff, and he sure wasn’t the last, but he set the bar for those who came after. What’s surprising is how many of them seem to sail right over it.